


August Prompts: Part 2

by Phantom_Ice



Series: Monthly Writing Prompts [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Heist, Of an inanimate object, POV Third Person Omniscient, Slice of Life, Tight Spaces, Vigilante Groups, Vigilantism, White Collar Crime, loss of life
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-03
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-12-10 12:05:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11691261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phantom_Ice/pseuds/Phantom_Ice
Summary: 02. New Groups- “They… they’re not here,” he finally admitted after a double search. Cynthia leaned back in horror, forced to admit the same of her drawer.“They have to be here! If we don’t destroy his evidence she’ll be killed! Not to mention the shipment will still be able to come in--”“Don’t tell me things I already know! I--”He was interrupted by Cynthia diving across the desk to tackle him against the far wall just as the window exploded inwards.05. Wallet- It was a simple brown thing. The stories of the many people who owned it weren't so simple.





	1. Spy vs Spy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 02\. New Groups- 
> 
> “They… they’re not here,” he finally admitted after a double search. Cynthia leaned back in horror, forced to admit the same of her drawer.
> 
> “They have to be here! If we don’t destroy his evidence she’ll be killed! Not to mention the shipment will still be able to come in--”
> 
> “Don’t tell me things I already know! I--”
> 
> He was interrupted by Cynthia diving across the desk to tackle him against the far wall just as the window exploded inwards.

“Move!” Cynthia whispered harshly while swatting away the sandy beige elbow that had lodged itself in her gut. The person to whom that elbow belonged swatted her back and then their shoulders were digging into each other. 

“There’s not exactly a ton of space in this vent, if you hadn’t noticed, so if you don’t mind,” David grumbled as he attempted to scoot forward. The sound of his boot hitting the aluminum sliding echoed around them and they both froze. After a few tense moments of silence, Cynthia decided it was safe and scowled at David. 

“Smooth move, genius.” She continued to explore the seem in the vent where it should lead down to the main offices. She finally fit her penknife into the gap and peeled back the thin metal, exposing the cramped dark space between the interior walls. 

“Okay, there’s no way anyone would have heard that. The offices are closed and night guard should still be on the twelfth floor,”

“Mhm, whatever.” The small girl wiggled through the gap, her black athletic wear clothing hugging her body firm so that she could fit into the most narrow of spaces. She shuffled sideways to where the large ‘X’ painted on the insulation was illuminated by the dim light of her bracelet. Carefully, she pushed on the spot in front of it. Instead of plaster, her gloved palm found a large square of canvas. Just as planned the wall behind the office painting had been removed piece by piece thanks to the cooperation of the boss's underappreciated secretary. 

Peeking out from behind the painting she double checked that the room was empty and then nodded back at David, whose head was emerging from the same place in the vents that she had come from. Carefully, he maneuvered himself feet first and wiggled himself through the gap as well. He was only a bit wider than Cynthia, but it still took a bit of contortionism to get that slightly wider frame through the gap. 

“Damn, I’m never going to the gym again,” he panted as he rubbed a small tear in his shoulder where the edge of the vent had caught him. 

“That alright?”

“Ya, fine,”

“Don’t get any blood anywhere,”

“Oh, wow, I never knew you cared.”

Cynthia rolled her eyes and double checked that her gloves were on snugly and her short black hair was still gelled down firmly against her scalp. Dylan was sporting the same questionable hairdo, as hats were deemed too bulky or too likely to fall off somewhere. Satisfied that everything was in place, she snuck out from behind the painting, Dylan following close behind. 

The office was large with an entire wall of windows looking out over the city. The light was enough that they both switched off their bracelets to conserve battery. The floor was light hardwood with a thick beige rug in the center. The desk was metal and glass, pushed all the way back so that it nearly touched the windows. It gave only enough room for someone thin to maneuver in and out of the seat that faced away from the view and towards the door. 

They headed immediately towards the desk and each started picking the locks of the drawers on either side. After a few moments of silent huffing, Dylan’s drawer popped open immediately followed by Cynthia. He gave her a teasing grin before turning to shuffle through the papers inside. 

“They… they’re not here,” he finally admitted after a double search. Cynthia leaned back in horror, forced to admit the same of her drawer. 

“They have to be here! If we don’t destroy his evidence she’ll be killed! Not to mention the shipment will still be able to come in--”

“Don’t tell me things I already know! I--”

He was interrupted by Cynthia diving across the desk to tackle him against the far wall just as the window exploded inwards. 

Shards of glass ricocheted around the room and the boom made the whole building seem to shake on its foundation.  
There was no way the guard didn’t notice whatever that was. All Cynthia had seen were the three dark shapes diving towards the glass. Missiles? Some other type of bomb?

“What do we have here?” A feminine voice questioned.

“Looks like we were nearly beaten to the punch, Eagle,” a more masculine voice replied.

Cynthia looked up from where her body was instinctually curved around David’s. Standing in the center of the office with pools of cloth by their feet were three people all about five years older than her and David, putting them somewhere in their mid-twenties. They were all wearing dark blue clothes with splashes of slightly lighter and slightly darker color on them. The woman who had spoken was looking at them with large eyes and an almost impressed seeming grin. Her skin was dark brown with a cool undertone and her hair was in two natural ties on either side of her head in a rather innocent looking hairdo. 

The man to her left shared her skin color but had a shorter build and close shorn hair. The man to her right had a slightly lighter brown skin tone with a more yellowish undertone. He was tall but not as stocky as the other two. 

“Pronghorn, secure the area,” the woman, Eagle, ordered. The taller man went to the far corner and started scanning with something that had been attached to his hip. “Racoon, get the papers.” The shorter man went immediately to the center of the room where he pulled back the rug. The Cynthia’s surprise there was a trapdoor directly underneath. He pulled that back to reveal the metal door of a safe. 

There was only one thing these people could be here for. Apparently, David came to the same conclusion. 

“Get away from there! We need those!” He stood up and squared his shoulders. However, seeing as he was shorter and scrawnier than even Eagle, it didn’t have much effect on anyone. Cynthia wasn’t even sure anyone heard him on account of the heavy winds blowing through the area, threatening to send them out the side of the building and twenty stories down. 

Regardless, Eagle took a few steps closer and Cynthia moved to stand shoulder to shoulder with her partner. Whatever happened, they were in this mess together. To her surprise, though, Eagle looked almost… fond. 

“Listen, kids, we’re on a schedule, but… did you two make it here by yourselves?”

“Those papers need to be destroyed. If the unit isn’t freed it’ll open up the harbor to a poison that could hurt a lot of people,” David shouted instead of answering. 

“Relax, we have no intention of making these public,”

“And we won’t let you keep them as blackmail either,” Cynthia added. 

“You two are really here to destroy the papers? Who are you working for?... No, no one in the know would hire a couple of kids… Jeez…”

“Area secure, this is the last of them,” Pronghorn interrupted, crushing something small with a pair of pliers he tucked back into his belt. Something beeped and a green light flashed. Racoon pulled open the safe and lifted a small manilla folder in a tight grip. 

“No!” David shouted and started to rush forward. Cynthia griped his arm at the same time that Eagle lifted a hand towards him and then nodded at Racoon. 

Racoon brought something small and metal up to the papers.

The whole folder went up in flames. Shielded by the trap door, the wind could do nothing to prevent the edges from blackening and curling in on themselves. Racoon dumped it all back into the safe and added something liquid from his belt that caused the flames to double in volume and then calm back down. Nothing in that safe was surviving. 

Eagle turned back towards the two of them where they were frozen in surprise. 

“Listen, it seems we’re on the same team, and I’m damn impressed with how far you got. Hell, it seemed we didn’t even have to get involved and make a show of the whole thing. But there’s more to this than just a falsely accused police unit and a few shipments of poison. If you really want to make a difference…” She handed Cynthia a small white card, about the size of a business card but folded in half. “You should join us. Our group could use some new blood like you two.” She saluted as she and her partners shuffled back into the baggy suits they had shed. Before Cynthia knew what had happened they had run back towards the shattered window and jumped back into the cool night air. 

“Hell,” Cynthia whispered. David was close enough to hear. 

"Tell me about it,”

“No, I mean, hell! Come on, we need to get back into this wall before--” Sirens echoed up to them from street level. 

“Oh… Hell!” David understood as she grabbed his arm and dragged him back into the wall. 

More to the story, huh? And a seemingly vigilante group that claimed to know the whole story… 

It was always nice to become part of a new group.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How did 'Tight Spaces' become a tag in two of my works in a row?  
> Whatevs.


	2. Lifespan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 05 Wallet- It was a simple brown thing. The stories of the many people who owned it weren't so simple.

It was a classic unassuming thing: brown leather with a small brass clasp and simple light brown stitching around the edges. It was the kind of wallet that could have belonged to anyone, though perhaps had a more stereotypically male leaning due to its ability to fit snuggly into the pocket of a standard pair of men’s jeans. 

It exited the assembly line on May 3rd, preceded and followed by thousands of identical bifolds. The first person to touch the finished product was Fan Tseng, who tied the last stitch. She was twenty-one at the time, though she had started working in the shop many years earlier. Her hands were calloused from constant work with both a needle and heavy machinery. Her features were plain, though she took particular pleasure in the small grove in her right ear, which she thought gave her character. After work that day she would walk home in the dark with two close friends and not jump at the loud bang that interrupts their discussion. After her two friends calmed down, the one in the middle would call her brave. The one on the other end would claim she wasn’t startled at all. Tseng would laugh at them both and disappear into her home. The next day she would have to run to work to avoid being late. By that time, the wallet that she had held in her hands less than twelve hours ago was in a shipping container at Ningbo-Zhoushan, ready to be loaded onto a cargo ship heading into Baltimore. 

The captain of that ship was Wallace Ningun. Wallace was thinking of his wife and child who he hadn’t seen in a few months. He planned to use the stop in Baltimore to finally visit again. The combination of that and lack of sleep from a previously made round trip caused him to turn a little too strongly into a wave thirteen days into their journey. The ship teetered for a moment and the shipping container above the one holding the new wallet tumbled into the ocean 4,631 miles from its destined port. Its remains would be retrieved one hundred and fourteen years later as part of a political bid to clean up the ocean floors.

The wallet was unloaded from the ship on June 5th and soon after arrived in the warehouse of a major department store where it sat for only a few weeks before being put on the shelf. 

Isaac Wellington was walking to the register of that store with his purchase of two shirts and a packet of socks when his eye was caught by a wire basket of plain wallets. He had been meaning to buy a new one for some time now and so he quickly snatched one out of the bin and continued on his way. On July 19th, the wallet Fan Tseng had held in her hand two months and sixteen days ago was sold to a white man with thinning hair and a small stain on the bottom corner of his blue button up shirt. 

The first amount of money the wallet held came in the form of two ten dollar bills, one five dollar bill, six singles, and thirty-six cents- three nickels, two dimes, one penny. One of the tens and a five went into lunch at the new deli that opened up near Isaac’s work as a civil engineer. All the coins beside the penny were put into a collection bin outside another department store. 

Four years into Isaac's ownership of it, his twelve-year old daughter retrieved his credit card from it a bit too roughly, tearing one of the inside seams. Seven years into his ownership he dropped it in a puddle outside of a food truck that he and his family were eating at, causing a slight discoloration in the corner. Nine years after its purchase, the worn wallet was stolen out of Isaac’s pocket while walking through the downtown area. He wouldn’t notice until he arrived back home that night. He would blame his eldest son’s new kid from moving it from the countertop until a purchase for $90 was made on his credit card at a gas station in Virginia. 

The purchase was made by twenty eight-year old Philippa Silone, who had seen Isaac stuff the wallet haphazardly into his back pocket while she was in Virginia with a friend. She bought an entire box of granola bars, a soft drink she spilled on her lacy green shirt, eight donuts, two packets of jerky, a new set of red headphones, four necklaces, and purple lingerie set before the credit card was canceled. 

The wallet stayed tucked into the back pocket of her baggy jeans for eight days before being dumped at a thrift shop twelve minutes from her home. It scratched along a hanger and received a nick along one of the sides when it landed in the donation box. She would be wearing those same jeans in seven years when her water broke and she prepared to bring her first child into the world. 

By that time the wallet was in the hands of Moran Turner. Moran’s young son had picked it out of its box and used his small allowance to gift it to Moran for Father’s Day. He had been attracted by the discoloration left by Isaac, thinking it rather resembled a dinosaur head. 

During its time with Moran, the wallet would carry its largest sum of money. $5,329 used as part of a down payment for a new family car. The car was a dark blue five seater with a high safety rating and a good amount of trunk space. 

The wallet was kept mostly in Moran’s back pocket and developed a naturally concave shape even when lying on countertops. The seam that had been broken on the inside by Isaac’s daughter came completely undone, rendering that particular pocket unusable. Years of wear bent the small button clasp so that it would no longer snap shut.  
Twelve years after he had gained the wallet, Moran bought a new one and stuffed the old leather one into a drawer at the bottom of his closet. It stayed there untouched behind empty bottles of hair product and a few old shirts for seventeen years before the Turner’s moved out of the house, leaving the contents of that drawer behind. 

The next family to move into that house were the Dentons. The Denton's would empty out that drawer, nearly throwing the wallet away. However, their sixteen-year-old daughter liked to collect old things and would find charm in the old leather’s worn patches and the crooked scratch from that long ago hanger in the thrift shop. She fixed up the broken seam with a bright red thread and replaced the old brass clasp with a new silver colored one. On the bottom corner, she’d engrave her initials, MD. 

When MD married and became ML, she put the wallet on a high up shelf in her closet and forgot about it for twenty two years. On May 3rd, the anniversary of the wallet’s manufacture, Fan Tseng died of natural causes with her son grasping tightly onto her hand. On that same day, ML’s husband would find it while looking for an old yearbook and ask to throw it out. ML would then frown and smile at the old engraving. She’d tell her husband to put it in her nightstand. Next year she gifted it to her own daughter as part of a graduation gift for med school. 

“Look, it already says MD on it,” she’d joke at the ceremony while her daughter rolled her eyes.  
When ML died of cancer six years later, her daughter had the wallet’s stitching redone (with the same red thread) and leather buffered. The daughter would carry the wallet around for years, always keeping it in top condition. When her son, Tanner, turned twenty-one she would gift it to him with a tight watery smile. 

Three years later he would be searching for his ID in the once repaired pocket when he stepped off the curb of a small snowy intersection in Washington state. The driver of the silver car wouldn’t see him until it was too late and the wallet would land in a snowdrift a few yards from his outstretched hand. 

The surgery lasted for eight hours and the physical therapy for months, but Tanner would come out of it with no long term consequences. 

The wallet would be picked up three days later by a drifter who would put it in a plastic baggie along with a shirt, two mismatched socks, and three baseball caps. 

The bag was stolen while the drifter slept two days before Isaac’s great granddaughter was married to a man she would divorce just a year later. 

This time, it stayed in the bargain bin of a thrift shop for seven months before being picked up by Joshua Roche, who was down on his luck. When he got back up on it two years later he threw the old wallet into his trash bin in favor of a new gray nylon one with a zipper.

On August 7 it would be dumped into a landfill in a bag that contained an egg carton, ruined strawberries, a used up paper towel roll, an empty six pack and all accompanying empty aluminum cans, and a broken bottle. The bag exactly eight acres north contained the body of Sarah McLean, whose murder would be solved two years later, three weeks after Isaac’s great granddaughter had her second wedding, this one to Philippa Silone’s second daughter. 

It would take sixty years for the leather of the wallet to completely decompose. The shipping container that had fallen into the ocean on the wallet's trip across the Atlantic had been recovered twenty-five years ago. Had Moran Turner and his wife still been alive when the last of it reabsorbed back into the soil on January 13, they would have been celebrating their 74th wedding anniversary. The only owner still alive would be Tanner Lawrence, and the last celebration he had was that of his grandsons twenty-first birthday. He'd give him a wallet, telling him a brief story about the one his own mother gave him for the same occasion. Of course, he’d leave out all the interesting details of the wallet’s lifespan. 

He didn’t know any of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Technically not the 5th anymore, but I'm on the same stream of consciousness, so I'll allow it.


End file.
